Angor Animi
by E. Gray
Summary: Rinoa's introspection and struggle with the feelings of loss and resentment that go along with the death of a loved one. Originally titled Niobe.


Disclaimer: I do not own Final Fantasy 8 or any of its characters. The franchise was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the characters by Tetsuya Normura, and it is all owned and licensed by Square Enix. No money was made in the creation or distribution of this story.

"Angor Animi"

Hollow.

It was the only word that came to mind. Her mind, though numb, had tried its best to feel out what it was that was holding her in this stasis of tears. Tried to pinpoint, with an adjective, what the miserable grip was on her heart. She felt as if someone was holding her head under the water and she was drowning in her own flood of tears. She was hollow.

Empty.

It was hard to distinguish where the hole was, really—what it was that was now lacking and empty in her still-whole being. It was infuriating, how she couldn't even distinguish her own affliction beyond the idea of sorrow. She wasn't strong enough today to punish herself for her own shortcomings, maybe tomorrow she would be. It was hard to tell what kind of a day it would be when she reluctantly opened her eyes every morning to the cerulean ceiling of sky that hung sadistically outside their bedroom window.

_Her_ bedroom window. She woke up alone in that bedroom, and she fell asleep alone—but not without the solemn company of her ubiquitous teardrops. They seemed forever falling down her face, no quantity of tissues or headache could ever parch the hollowness from which they sprang.

She had not yet let herself change the sheets. Perhaps it was cruel and malicious of her, sadistic even—to leave them hugging the queen mattress as if nothing was amiss. As if she didn't press her face to his pillow and smell the fragrance of his hair; take the flat sheet in her fists and absorb the tears into the fabric that still smelled of his skin. As if he might come home and lay in them with her.

He was not coming home. They had buried him two days ago, and the tears had flowed. They had ran down her stone white face, merging at passive junctions on her cold cheeks; like rain on a window, and fallen off her chin like glass beads to the grass below her feet. Her sorrow would nourish the flowers that would spring from his grave.

Rinoa remained in bed, feeling hollow and hating the space that lingered in her chest. He was gone, that was true. What was it then, that was missing in her body? She felt so cold, truly as if she were a shell, as if something had been surgically removed and a bubble of frigid air left in its place. What had Squall taken with him when he took his last breath against her shoulder?

Oh god. Just remembering felt like an impossibility. It was all smeared together, like wet paint in the rain, like a nightmare that can't be remembered after waking in a cold sweat. God knew she had relived it in her nightmares and jerked up in bed, each time almost sure he would be beside her, sleeping with his right forearm flung over his eyes. He had developed a habit of falling asleep in such a manner to block out the light from the bedside lamp when she stayed up reading on Saturdays. It was adorable, she had to admit, although it had been his way of griping about the light. He always had found quiet, obstinate ways to make his points.

And yet, in that waking, he was never there. The nightmare remained smeared and obtuse, a memory filled with smoke and uncertain shapes. The coldness in her chest, however, always sharp and acute like a fresh puncture wound.

Puncture wounds, oh yes, how could she forget? He'd had them going into his stomach and chest, four or five of them—each as wide in diameter as a water glass. And bleeding, almost spurting.

It had started as just a small skirmish; something he wouldn't have even ordinarily been involved in. When casualties had grown in number, they'd sent him in with a few A-class men to clean up the problem; all of whom had met a similar fate. Someone hadn't been doing their job; the boys hadn't been junctioned to face that kind of armament.

Oh, and he was bleeding, the wounds so hot, so bright red that it almost hurt her eyes to watch as the wetness grew on his white shirt. His hand pressed to them, the black glove creaking and sodden with the red, red, red as he was hauled in, stumbling into the loading bay of the ship, to everyone's absolute shock. Red was everywhere, growing on his abdomen, on his hands, her hands as she pressed them against his, on her lap and down her legs like scarlet Christmas ribbons; gathering in garnet lakes around her on the metal panels of the Ragnarok's loading bay. In her mind, his face appeared, white and irritated with the unrelenting agony. She remembered him nodding vacantly at inquiries, though barely comprehending a word. He was trying to make it seem that it wasn't a big deal, he'd been through worse. That he would be alright in a minute and stand up, dust himself off, and go take care of whatever, whoever had managed to do this to him. 

But he never stood up. He pressed his hands against the pouring wounds on his stomach while they were summoning the Garden Paramedics, the blood worming between the black fingers of his gloves, the crimson raining out of the exit wounds in his back while they'd stuffed towels behind him. He'd been reclined against her lap, her couched legs elevating his back, that searing red dripped down her legs while she casted curaga after curaga that wouldn't take through all the bleeding. His head tilted against her neck as she leaned in closer, the tears gathering like rain in a fallen leaf—his labored breathing growing more ragged, his unfocused eyes lingering on the air between their faces. The pressure he had been fighting to maintain on his entry wounds faltering as his shaking, blood sodden hands caught hers. The red ran freely, a vermilion river. He'd drug his voice out from his constricted, dry throat, attempting to squeeze her hands in his palms but failing. His shaking fingers held a slippery grip, his voice shivering out through his clenched teeth, his stare struggling to catch hers beneath heavy eyelids.

"Rinoa…hey, don't…don't look like that. You know…I…"

Sadly, she didn't know. He had never even finished his sentence. Something about that angered her. Death couldn't wait a single second more to take him? He couldn't even be allowed to finish his last thought? Those had been the last words to leak from his mouth, followed by a calm, shivering exhalation. His life pouring out, leaking onto the floor around them. His life that stained the steel floor and her blue duster, his life that felt like it stained her hands even over a week later as Rinoa gnarled them together in their bed.

Her bed.

She was stained. So empty, hollow. And she cried. It was the only constant remaining now—the tears that curiously would not stop. The pounding in her head did nothing to sate the thirst of her grieving. Grieving. She knew Squall could understand that. Her slick face turned on her pillow, toward the empty side of the bed, where a silver thread of moonlight stretched over the gray-blue pillow where he would rest his head. She had left black spiderlegged crescents stained into the fabric where her mascara had melted off her hot, wet eyes the first few nights…the first few nights she had been coherent by the time she fell asleep, at least. She didn't know why she had bothered to attempt to put mascara on after that. The stained black tears had been raining down her face when he was still alive, breathing against her bare shoulder and bleeding. Once his breath had drawn to a halt, his hands growing limp and freeing hers—the tears had changed. She hadn't even been aware she was screaming until her throat was giving out---the discordant screams skipping like a scratched record, the hands of her friends clutching at her numb shoulders as if it would bring comfort or some kind of bridge to reality. They didn't. She'd been pulled away from him as well as the paramedics arrived too late, trying to administer phoenix down that failed; he was too far gone. Dead. Staring with vacant eyes up toward the ceiling while Selphie threw her thin arms around Rinoa, face blotched red from her own sobbing, in any attempt to soothe the poor girl.

And all she could think of…was that Selphie should be used to this kind of thing. After all. She was a SeeD. How many people had she sent to this same fate when they asked it of her? How could she cry like she was a normal person? She may have originally seemed the most normal to her, but the more she'd thought about it…even Selphie had an unhealthy obsession with destruction. What kind of psychosis was that perpetual grin hiding?

She'd reprimanded herself for those thoughts later. It wasn't Selphie's fault that she was…the way she was. Who she was. _What_ she was. It was SeeD. SeeD was to fault for everyone's suffering; whether they knew it or not. 

Since then, it had been nightmarish. It felt like trying to remember the details of a nightmare. The insane, nonsensical details and words jut up violently in her calm thoughts—broken fragments of the memory she did not want to piece together. A broken memory coming back to break her heart into smaller pieces each time. Yes, it was broken—but it was still there. The beating that continued assured her of that. It was not the thing that was missing.

Rinoa stared across the hills of the rumpled sheets. Night had descended and passed, a candy pink sunrise was kissing the edges of the darkness, driving it back to create another perfect blue sky. Time was passing without her. She was a statue of mourning; some tragic cemetery angel, forever crying like the unfortunate Niobe. The mythical Niobe, turned to stone but still refusing to stop her tears. Like some changeless statue of past disaster, like Lot's Wife as a pillar of salt.

So. Hollow. It was the only word that properly described how she felt now. Beyond the grief, the utter disbelief, the pain, the intense sorrow, the anguish, the loneliness, hopelessness…the one thing she felt that she could see behind. Emptiness.

5:30 AM. Squall would have been waking up about now. The alarm would chime and he would grunt and flail around for the device to silence it, roll onto his left side, his hands finding her in the dark, and kiss her. They often had made love in the mornings, when it was still magically dawn; too often he arrived back too late and too exhausted at night to even move. She remembered making love on a cold, rainy morning in November—clinging to his warm body as he moved. Breathing in the scent of his shampoo, his after-shave, his sweat. Raking back his damp hair with her fingers, listening to him breathe. His soft, breathless 'good morning' afterward.

How…how could it all be gone?

Rinoa knew there was no God. God would not have let something so wrong happen—and Squall's death was wrong. It felt all wrong. The world seemed to be literally crumbling, time shivering and losing grip on itself, light and dark and cold and hot all losing meaning and feeling. What was life, to do things like this? Why was life worth living if everything that made it the suffering bearable was ripped away and torn apart? Her own mother had been ripped away, and she had felt hollow, even at that young age, she knew the meaning of "never again." She had cried. But it had become a numb reality. She didn't consider it. The days and the reality had just soaked into the background of daily denial and forgotten stories. Life had gone on. Mother had loved her little girl, her beautiful, sweet girl. And that man, the "father" that was left…he was just stone carved to look like a man. After the car accident, after Julia was dead, he'd withdrawn even further. If looking at the little girl had reminded him of his dead wife, there was never any hint of emotion or recognition. He'd provided, but he'd never loved. Never cared. He had no love. In his veins, only the thin, cold blood of a military general. He was barely human, he was barely a man. He was wrong. He had no heart, no thoughts, no morals, no emotion.

In Squall, she saw what she could have loved in her father. Beneath the coldness there was a fragile heart, under the warrior's skin ran hot blood, behind the ice blue eyes there was gentility and love. Yes, love. Even the Lion of Balamb had learned to show what was in his heart when it was important enough to him. But she was no Electra. Squall had been the antithesis of Caraway, the same picture in negative. She had eventually come to terms with his ability to take life; to destroy if the Garden asked it of him. But therein had laid the inherent difference between the two men. There had been regret and guilt in Squall's eyes, in his body language for weeks after missions had ended in that often inevitable result. He hadn't been a SeeD for so long that the killing, that the brutality had consumed his humanity. There had been nights he'd come home to her, hands scrubbed raw, and crawl into bed to hold her against him, trembling and silent until sleep claimed him. He would whisper apologies for no reason.

He'd never had to tell her on nights like that. She knew he had taken someone's life, and not just in battle, something which he viewed more objectively as casualties of war. Assassination, torture and disposal…despite having been trained; having grown up with it as a reality, those things could shake him, despite their necessity. To be sure, she'd initially had a worse time of that reality than he did; the young girl she'd been had no notion of the less savory parts of…practically anything. They had fought, she'd yelled and screamed and sobbed in disbelief, and he'd reasoned with her as much as he'd could, but his sangfroid ran not so deep as to paralyze him of the reality of being a murderer as opposed to a soldier. That was the difference between the Garden's military and SeeD. SeeD wasn't used as infantry; they were operatives. As the commander of the outfit; when something dirty had to be done, there was no question who would be sent. But as long as she was there to hold him, to bring him back to reality…he could handle what they required of him. After all, he relied on the sanctuary of Garden to keep her safe when he could not; to keep her shielded from the political world.

Now he too, had been ripped away. Dead and buried at 23 years old, killed because of someone else's incompetence; because of SeeD. And she was again alone; as, she supposed, everyone is alone. The burning truths had come down in a torrential downpour of tears. All we think and feel is all we really have. And there is never enough time.

Rinoa felt sick, her head pounding and her eyes near raw from the endless, silent flow. What was it, to die? Where was he now that he was not here? Now that they had buried his body, marked his grave with an empty formal epitaph that he would have hated…was there somewhere to go? Or was the end of life simply that? An end? She couldn't bear to think that he was just gone. Just nonexistent. It made her miss him that much more, thinking how lonely he could be. How lonely and dark and cold it would be in that coffin, under the 6 feet of Balambian soil where she could never reach him again. Why did this happen?

Why?

There was nothing resembling a good enough answer, a reason. She would not let darkness claim Squall, her mother, herself. She wanted to fill them with meaning, find them in the compressed void of time and space that was death--and wrench them all free of the darkness. They could not just disappear. They _were_. She wouldn't…couldn't believe it. She would create a grave for herself and crawl into it, settle into the grave where she could huddle with her mother, with Squall, with the things that had bled away from her. She felt it, the madness, and she pressed against its door—but it would never let her in. Instead, she was left to herself, hollow and echoing the hatred of the world through her cavernous grief. Somehow, one day when she could stop crying, she would avenge the universe the injustice of this death, of the suffering of their lives. Even if she had to bring the end of time to her, she would get there.

Rinoa rolled onto her right side, facing the emptiness that she had denied for too long now. The moonlight had faded from his empty pillow, the crawling rose flushed light of the new morning wormed through the wrinkles in the sheets and over the sheen of her dark hair as she embraced his pillow, smelling him. She would not accept this darkness she imagined. The oblivion was too unbearable to consider. There were too many things she didn't know about the world, she couldn't believe she knew enough to be sure she'd never see him again. After all, she was a sorceress. She would find a way. She would wait until the end of time if it was necessary, on the beach in Centra where he promised he'd be if they were separated. Even if she had to pluck out every moment that had ever been and squeeze it all into one instant, she could find him there; and well, everything would be fine. 

With a pale, absent hand, she reached down where her chain lay against the sheets; two rings pressed their cool metal into her hand.

Then everything would be fine. Rinoa exhaled a long, shuddering breath into the cradle of her arms. The tears had dried. She curled her arms around the pillow that still held his scent.

Tonight, she would sleep.


End file.
